9 Musée du Louvre

9 Musée du Louvre

Gabriel spent the night at the Godolphin Hotel in Marazion and was back in central London by one the following afternoon.

He dropped his car at Hertz and his gun at Isherwood Fine Arts and boarded a Eurostar train bound for Paris. Three hours later

he was extracting himself from the back of a taxi outside the Louvre. Naomi Wallach, as promised, was waiting next to the

pyramid. They had spoken only briefly while Gabriel was hurtling across the fields of northern France. Now, in the fading

light of the Louvre's Cour Napoléon, she regarded him carefully, as though trying to decide whether he was a clever forgery

or the real thing.

"You're not at all what I expected," she said at last.

"I hope you're not disappointed."

"Pleasantly surprised." She removed a packet of cigarettes from her handbag and lit one. "You mentioned that you were a friend

of Hannah Weinberg."

"A close friend."

"She never spoke of you."

"At my request."

The late Hannah Weinberg had been the director of the Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France. Located on the rue des Rosiers in the Marais, the center was the target of one of the deadliest terrorist attacks carried out by the Islamic State. Naomi Wallach, a Holocaust restitution specialist focusing on issues related to art, should have been among the dead and wounded. But she was running late that morning and arrived to find the building ablaze and her friend Hannah lying in the ruins. A photograph of the two women, one brutally murdered, the other tearing at her garment in anguish, would become the atrocity's defining image. Consequently, when the director of the Louvre was looking for an outsider to at long last purge the museum's collection of looted works of art, Naomi Wallach was judged to be the perfect candidate.

She turned her head and expelled a stream of smoke. "Forgive me, Monsieur Allon. A filthy habit, I know."

"There are worse."

"Name one."

"Buying a painting that belonged to someone who perished in the Holocaust."

"A great many Frenchmen were afflicted with this habit during the war, including a curator from this very museum."

"The curator's name," said Gabriel, "was René Huyghe."

Naomi Wallach regarded him over the ember of her cigarette. "It sounds to me as though you know a good deal about the Nazi

looting of France."

"I am by no means an expert on the subject. But I was involved in a case many years ago that led to the recovery of a considerable

number of looted paintings."

"Where did you find them?"

"They were in the hands of a Swiss private banker whose only surviving child just happens to be the world's most famous violinist."

Her eyes narrowed. "Not the Augustus Rolfe case?"

Gabriel nodded.

"I'm impressed, Monsieur Allon. That was quite a scandal. But what brings you to the Louvre?"

"A favor for a friend."

"You can do better than that, can't you?"

"The friend is a detective for the Devon and Cornwall Police in England."

Her expression darkened. "Charlotte Blake?"

Gabriel nodded. "The detective asked me to review some papers that she left on her desk the afternoon of her death. It looked

to me as though she was conducting provenance research on a Picasso."

"Untitled portrait of a woman in the surrealist style, oil on canvas, ninety-four by sixty-six centimeters?"

"You knew about the project?"

She nodded slowly.

"May I ask how?"

Naomi Wallach smiled sadly. "Because I was the one who asked her to find that painting."

***

They crossed the Place du Carrousel and set off along the Allee Centrale of the Jardin des Tuileries. The limbs of the plane

trees lay bare against the evening sky. The dusty gravel footpath crunched beneath their feet.

Naomi Wallach raised her cigarette to her lips and drew. "I've told myself that I will find a new dreadful habit after I recover

all the paintings that were stolen from the Jews of France during the war and return them to their rightful owners."

"You've set for yourself an unattainable goal, Madame Wallach."

"If I believed that, I never would have accepted the position at the Louvre. The collection contains seventeen hundred paintings that were either looted by the Nazis or acquired under dubious circumstances. It is my job to establish an unassailable provenance for each piece and then track down a living heir with a valid claim. A monumental task."

"Which is why you asked Professor Blake to conduct a provenance investigation on your behalf."

Naomi Wallach nodded. "I didn't have time to give the matter the attention it deserved. But there was also an ethical question

involved. Since taking the job at the Louvre, I have refrained from conducting private inquiries. Especially inquiries as

sensitive as the one involving Bernard Lévy."

"Who was he?" asked Gabriel.

"A successful businessman with an eye for modern and avant-garde art. Monsieur Lévy went into hiding with his wife and daughter

after the Paris Roundup in July 1942. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and gassed upon arrival. His wife was on the same

transport."

"And their daughter?"

"She was taken in by a Catholic family in the Free Zone and managed to survive the war. She married a fellow survivor named

Léon Cohen in 1955 and a year later gave birth to a child she named Emanuel. He was completing his medical training at the

Sorbonne when she finally told him about her experiences during the Occupation." Naomi Wallach paused. "And about the small

collection of paintings that had hung in her family's apartment in Paris."

"A collection that included a woman in the surrealist style by Pablo Picasso, which Bernard Lévy had purchased from Galerie

Paul Rosenberg in 1937."

"Perhaps." Naomi Wallach dropped her cigarette to the footpath and ground it out with the toe of a stylish boot. "These cases are always complicated. Dr. Cohen had no photographs, receipts, or documentation of any kind to support his claim. He told me that his grandparents left everything behind when they fled Paris and went into hiding in the south."

"What did they do with the Picasso and the rest of the paintings?"

"Evidently, Lévy entrusted them to his lawyer in Paris." She picked up the cigarette butt and tossed it into a rubbish bin.

"A certain Monsieur Favreau."

"And Favreau sold them?"

"Dr. Cohen believed that to be the case."

"What else did he believe?"

"That his grandfather's Picasso was inside the Geneva Freeport."

The Freeport was a six-hundred-thousand-square-foot storage facility located in an industrial quarter of Geneva. At last estimate,

the complex contained more than a million paintings, including the largest collection of Picassos outside the Spaniard's heirs.

"It's a distinct possibility," said Gabriel. "But why did Cohen suspect that it was there?"

"He claimed to have seen the painting with his own eyes."

"In a storage vault?"

" Non . At a gallery that operates within the boundaries of the Freeport. There are several, you know. Dr. Cohen visited this gallery

several months ago to see if there were any untitled Picasso portraits on the market. And guess what he saw there?"

"His grandfather's Picasso?"

She nodded.

"Did he ask to see the provenance?"

"Of course. But the dealer said the painting wasn't for sale and refused to let him see it."

"And the dealer's name?"

"Dr. Cohen refused to tell me."

"Why?"

"He thought it might taint my investigation if I knew the painting's whereabouts in advance. He wanted an unimpeachable provenance

report from a leading expert that he could present in court."

There was a certain logic to it. "And when you told him that you weren't available?"

"He asked me for the name of someone who was up to the job. Charlotte Blake was the obvious choice. She was a world-class

historian and provenance researcher, and her book on Picasso and the Occupation was extraordinary. She was also quite disdainful

of the business of art, especially the so-called collectors who acquire paintings strictly for investment purposes and then

lock them away in places like the Geneva Freeport."

They had reached the end of the Allee Centrale. Evening traffic was careening around the Place de la Concorde. They turned

to the right and headed toward the Jeu de Paume.

"Scene of the greatest art heist in history," said Naomi Wallach. "Tens of thousands of paintings now worth untold billions

of dollars. But it is important to remember, Monsieur Allon, that the Nazis were not the only perpetrators. They had willing

accomplices, men who took advantage of the situation to line their pockets or adorn their walls. Those who retain possession

of paintings they know to be looted are not blameless. They are accessories to a crime in progress. Charlotte Blake shared

my opinion. That's why she was willing to take Emanuel Cohen's case."

"And when you learned that she had been killed?"

"I was shocked, of course, as was Dr. Cohen."

"I'd like to have a word with him."

"I imagine you would. But I'm afraid that's not possible."

"Why?"

"Because last evening, while walking home to his apartment in Montmartre, Dr. Emanuel Cohen fell to his death down the steps

of the rue Chappe. The police seem to think he slipped somehow." Naomi Wallach's hand shook as she lit another cigarette.

"Perhaps it wasn't an accident, after all."